Your Right to Know

With his findings of wrongdoing against 17 of 18 wildlife officers rejected as “unverifiable,”
the state inspector general now questions whether Ohio Department of Natural Resources officials
illegally withheld records from his investigators.

Natural resources officials’ decision to liberate 16 officers from desks and return them to
law-enforcement duties was based, in part, on a review of records not given to Inspector General
Randall J. Meyer, a department spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

An inspector general’s report issued in December compared timesheets with deer-harvest records
and concluded that the wildlife officers improperly pocketed state pay while hunting on duty.

The department then conducted its own investigation and concluded that the charges could not be
proven and largely were attributable to shoddy management record-keeping that did not accurately
reflect when the wildlife officers were working.

Carl Enslen, a deputy inspector general and Meyer’s spokesman, questioned the agency’s
conclusions and whether its officials failed in their legal duty to provide records to assist the
office with its investigation.

“There must be concern that records were not made available,” Enslen said yesterday. “Not
providing the inspector general with the documents to perform an investigation, as was requested of
the agency, would be an action contrary to law.”

Enslen also asked whether accountability had been achieved by wildlife officials.

Returning the officers accused of misconduct to the field “leads to the question whether
shifting the wrongful act of creating inaccurate payroll records from the employees to the
administrators makes the wrongdoing go away,” Enslen said.

Natural-resources spokeswoman Bethany McCorkle said that nothing was held back. “We handed
everything over and fully cooperated with the inspector general,” she said.

McCorkle said the department learned information not available to the inspector general through
interviews with the officers, who had refused to talk to the inspector general on the advice of
counsel.

The department says it had fixed problems with wildlife officers’ payroll time-keeping before
Meyer’s investigation.

In a letter sent to Meyer on Monday, Director James Zehringer wrote that his agency reviewed
records given to the inspector general, “as well as other documents, including cellphone records
(and) automatic vehicle locator plotted data.”

State law allows the inspector general access to all records held by executive-branch agencies
and requires officials to cooperate with investigators, but there is no penalty for failure to
comply.

Zehringer also wrote that the internal investigation benefited from “mandatory interviews” with
the accused wildlife officers.

In his letter, Zehringer wrote that officers’ use of flex time, coupled with inaccurate
deer-harvest records and “historic management deficiencies,” led Meyer astray in his
conclusions.

Of the 18 officers cited in Meyer’s report for hunting on the job, 16 went back to work on
Wednesday. One retired, and another, James Carnes of Highland County, remains in a desk job pending
disciplinary action.